Designing an Idea Screening Framework for Employee-driven Innovation

Abstract

As ever more companies encourage their employees to realize innovations, a surplus of ideas that exceeds the available resources to implement them has become reality in many organizations. With this paper, we follow recent calls for designing IT-supported, comprehensive, multi-attributive idea screening throughout the whole innovation cycle. Our Idea Screening Framework is grounded in literature and empirical data we collected from a two-year field study in a multinational European banking software provider. We identify a set of dimensions for screening ideas and show with a prototype how the framework can support innovation practices by facilitating the evaluation, selection, and tracking of ideas for managers and innovators.

Keywords: Idea screening, employee-driven innovation, digital innovation, idea tracking, idea evaluation, idea elicitation